Somebody told me later that Otto Larsen and Eddie Daniels ran a tight ship when they were at sea. But when they hit port\u2014look out. They turned into a couple of lusty, high-spirited roughnecks out for a good time. And they usually found it.<\/p>\n
Otto was first mate and Eddie second mate on a 22,000- ton freighter that worked both coasts of North America. Portland was home port and their ship docked the day prohibition ended. Somewhere during the ensuing melee, they hooked up with my mother and Agnes.<\/p>\n
Late that night, the two party girls brought Otto and Eddie home for a nightcap. As it happened sometimes, the two guys stayed over for breakfast. Otto and my mother took one bedroom, Eddie and Agnes took another, and I stayed holed up in my own messy back room. (About that time, I was working my way through Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan of the Apes<\/em>. I tried to read one chapter each night in bed.)<\/p>\n From that point on, though, whenever Otto and Eddie’s ship came into port, my mother would discreetly scoot me over to my grandparents’ for a few days. Sometimes, we’d all get together for dinner.<\/p>\n Underneath their bluster, Otto and Eddie were a couple of generous, good-natured characters. At my grandparents’ flat, I remember vividly one night the two of them came bursting in with a package of thick steaks, a slab of bacon, a wheel of cheese, and I think one or two bottles of bourbon and a case of pop\u2014all compliments of ships stores, they said.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n Otto was tall and lanky, with a thick Nordic accent that gave me a lot of trouble at the start. When he drank too much, he would sometimes belt out Norwegian folk songs at the top of his deep off-key voice. I had no idea what in the devil he was singing about\u2014or talking about either, for that matter.<\/p>\n On the other hand, Eddie was as American as they come. With sloping, heavily-muscled shoulders, he was built like an old-time line backer. He said he was born and raised on a Nebraska farm\u2014a cornhusker who left home when he was 16 years old.<\/p>\n What captivated me about Eddie, however, was that crazy double thumb on his right hand. Honest to God, sticking out of his right thumb at a 45\u00b0 angle was a small mutant\u2014a second thumb, nail and all. As an eleven-year- old, I thought it was grotesque. And utterly fascinating.<\/p>\n Otto told me the\u00a0crew called Eddie, “Double Thumb” Daniels, but never to his face.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n During one of their visits, Otto and Eddie took me on board for a tour of their ship and a memorable lunch. Over the years, I’ve often tried to recall the name of their vessel. It still escapes me. What I do remember was the obvious respect the crew paid the two mates. And I remember the lunch as an ugly platter of\u00a0codfish and boiled potatoes, followed by the most unusual, richly- flavored vanilla ice cream Id ever tasted. It was real vanilla bean ice cream, a proud specialty of the ship’s cook. He made it himself.<\/p>\n My grandmother was probably the only other person in the whole wide world who could dip into soft vanilla ice cream with the same insatiable gusto I displayed. She blushed and beamed with pleasure that next day when Otto and Eddie brought her a bouquet of flowers along with a full gallon can of freshly-made vanilla ice cream, right off the ship. They said the ice cream was a treat for the two of us.<\/p>\n We took ’em literally.<\/p>\n After they left with my mother and Agnes, we wasted no time. My grandmother and I began digging deep into the ice cream, piling one scoop on top of another in cereal bowls\u2014gorging ourselves\u2014and coming back for more. Sometime later, when we gradually slowed down, feeling satiated, bloated, vaguely sick and somewhat guilty, we realized we could see the bottom of the one-gallon can.<\/p>\n The entire episode was self-indulgent, gluttonous and glorious. Somehow, I think Brillat-Savarin would have understood.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n Once in awhile, Agnes Peterson liked to get down in the dirt and shoot some marbles. Said she’d been a “deadeye” when she was a kid. On two successive shootouts, after she won all my marbles, I learned that I’d better believe her.<\/p>\n We were only playing “funsies,” so she gave them back to me. But at Buckman, during the lunch hour and after school, kids “played for keeps.” That’s when you keep any of the other guy’s marbles you knock out of the ring. Or vice versa. I won a few and lost a few. One time, however, I lost all my marbles in a hard-fought game with a schoolmate named Fred Hage.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n My mother surprised me with a new bag of marbles when my grades improved and I made the\u00a0school honor roll\u2014for the first time in my life. She even included two beautiful aggies, which are heavier marbles made of agate. Aggies make great shooters. They give you more backspin and help you stay in the ring after hitting the other guy’s marbles out.<\/p>\n I didn’t put any of my new aggies at risk in a game of “keeps,” however, until after Agnes taught me a better way to “knuckle down.” Instead of using the index knuckle, she taught me how to press the middle knuckle firmly in the dirt as a stronger base for shooting.<\/p>\n I practiced her technique and it helped.<\/p>\n One day after school, Fred Hage challenged me to a game “for keeps.” It was a tough one. Back and forth, the marbles flew. But I was on a roll that day and eventually, I cleared the ring. I won almost all of Fred’s marbles, including one of his favorite aggie shooters.<\/p>\n I was never considered one of the really hot players. However, from that day on, I did hold my own.<\/p>\n I wonder, do kids anywhere play marbles nowadays? Probably not. Nevertheless, a few colorful expressions from the game still linger in American slang.<\/p>\n “He plays for keeps.”<\/p>\n “Knuckle down.”<\/p>\n “Have you lost all your marbles?”<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n Some kids at Buckman collected baseball trading cards. Some collected stamps. Some collected coins.<\/p>\n In our hard-scrabble neighborhood, the popular fad was collecting and trading match book covers. I don’t mean any old used matchbook cover you might find tossed in the gutter. I mean pristine new, unsoiled matchbooks from famous places, exotic locations, or maybe even a local beer joint with a clever name.<\/p>\n I had one of the best collections of the bunch. Otto and Eddie helped me see to that. They brought me a handful of new, out-of-town matchbooks every time they came into port. And they usually included a few extras which I then used to negotiate trades. My mother and Agnes fattened the collection, too, as they played around. They made a game out of it\u2014looking for likely, offbeat additions.<\/p>\n I can recall only a few of those prized childhood mementos now. One special favorite that does still come to mind was a glamorous, mint condition matchbook from The Stork Club\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>in New York. I think I had to trade an extra from San Francisco’s Top of the Mark<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong>along with one from The Old Absinthe House Ba<\/strong>r<\/em> <\/strong>in New Orleans in order to get that Stork Club beauty.<\/p>\n (At that time, The Stork Club<\/em><\/strong> was columnist Walter Winchell’s nightly hangout. It also became famous as the favorite Manhattan watering hole for members of so- called “Cafe Society.”)<\/p>\n Another prize in my collection was a striped matchbook that Otto brought me from the S. S. Aquarius<\/em><\/strong>, one of two or three luxurious gambling yachts that plied their trade during the ’30s just outside the three-mile-limit off the Southern California coastline. Speedboats operating out of San Pedro would take high-rollers to and from these floating casinos.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n Two things happened that broke up the long-running Otto and Eddie show.<\/p>\n First, the shipping company offered Otto Larsen a key berth on the east coast where he figured he could get his master’s papers and the captaincy of his own ship within two or three years. He grabbed at the transfer, said his goodbyes on all sides, and headed for New York. It\u00a0happened fast.<\/span><\/p>\n A short time later, Eddie Daniels and Agnes Peterson pulled a fast one on us, too. They drove down to Reno for a three-day vacation\u2014and they came back married.<\/p>\n Married? Agnes and Eddie? We were all happily astonished. For Agnes, it was her third marriage\u2014her second to a merchant marine sailor. For Eddie, it was his first. My mother threw a small party for them and it wasfun to watch as the newlyweds cavorted like a couple of big, playful, overgrown puppies.<\/p>\n They moved into an apartment across the river in northwest Portland, up near the old ice skating rink. Once they were settled, Eddie returned to sea, while Agnes went back to Minnesota for a visit with her family.<\/p>\n At the flat on Taylor Street, my mother and I were now alone.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n The romance between Emma Lindquist and Dick Rankin faded fast.<\/p>\n The story we heard was that Rankin Field operations were going broke. Then “Tex” Rankin decided to make another go of it as a barn-stormer, and he pulled his kid brother, Dick, along with him. So it was more stunts and exhibitions. More air races. An occasional Hollywood job.\u00a0More and more travel. Emma said no thanks.<\/p>\n During one of their quarrels, Emma walked out on Rankin and moved in with us for a week or two. It was during that moody period that she took me with her to see Myrna Loy and Clark Gable in a lurid film noir<\/em><\/strong> called “Manhattan Melodrama.” Myrna Loy was Emma’s favorite motion picture actress. I had no opinion on Myrna Loy one way or the other. But I liked Clark Gable. And I remember that I thought the movie was terrific. I sat there goggle-eyed during that climactic scene when Gable, as “Blackie” the gangster, strode to the electric chair with a bemused smile on his face.<\/p>\n A few days later, Emma flashed in front of me the Portland Oregonian<\/em><\/strong> headline and front page story: John Dillinger, Public Enemy No. 1, had been gunned down the night before by the FBI as he came out of the Biograph Theater in Chicago with “the woman in red.” Agent Melvin Purvis and his men had been waiting outside for more than two hours. They’d been tipped off. When Dillinger emerged from the theater, the FBI agents closed in. His mysterious girl friend stepped to one side. Dillinger reached for his automatic. They shot him dead.<\/p>\n What was the movie that Dillinger and his girl friend had gone to see that fateful night at the Biograph Theater? Myrna Loy and Clark Gable in “Manhattan Melodrama!”<\/p>\n (Some years later, the biographers of Franklin D. Roosevelt reported that Myrna Loy also had been FDR’s favorite motion picture actress.)<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n The New Deal did not wipe out the Great Depression. Far from it. By the mid ’30s, nearly 63 percent of the population still lived below the poverty line. National income was still less than half of what it had been during the Roaring Twenties. Almost one-third of the workforce was still unemployed. And it was still tough going for our family and our neighborhood.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n However, the New Deal did help to reduce the suffering. It helped some people get back to work, if only for awhile. It sparked a renewed spirit across America\u2014\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>a feeling that better days might be just around the corner.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n <\/p>\n My grandparents lost out on their free rent deal at the\u00a0flat on Salmon Street. And my mother, alone, could no longer afford to pay for the flat on Taylor Street. So my grandparents and my mother rented a crumbling old two- story house at Southeast 14th and Pine, and we all moved in together. The location was only two blocks from Washington High, where I was to go to school a year or two later.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Work Progress Administration (WPA) was a temporary godsend. This vast emergency program helped millions of desperate, hungry, out-of- work men and women feed their families and regain some sense of dignity and self-respect. It put people to work for the federal government on useful and in many cases triumphant projects, while it helped people avoid the humiliation of script or cash handouts. These were folks who wanted to work<\/em><\/strong> for the money they received. The WPA not only put several million blue collar workers back on a job, it sponsored and stimulated extraordinary achievement in the theater, music and the arts, as well as in federal and university research.<\/p>\n My tough old grandfather, Jim Dewey, unemployed and still doggedly refusing to sign up for cash relief, finally did agree to take a job with the WPA\u2014as a ditch-digger.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n On Sunday afternoons, for the fun of it, my mother and I would sometimes go “house hunting.” That was wishful recreation during the depression. We’d get in her old jalopy and go visit open houses. It seemed like everything was for sale or for rent. We’d walk in and walk all around and my mother would day-dream about where she would put this and where she would put that and where her room would be and where my room would be. I’d go out back and see what kind of trees there would be to climb. At some of the big houses with rolling land out behind, I’d day-dream about where I’d keep a horse, maybe two.<\/p>\n My mother wanted so much to have a home and garden of her\u00a0own.<\/span><\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n <\/p>\n My neighborhood buddy, Chuck Brown, and I were both diehard Western movie fans, like most 11 and 12- year-old boys of that era. I plastered one wall of my room with fan magazine photos of cowboy\u00a0stars like Hoot Gibson, Buck Jones, Tom Mix and Ken Maynard\u2014along with my favorite photo of “Lindy,” a photo of the actress Sally Eilers (Hoot Gibson’s wife), a photo of Jimmy Doolittle sitting in the cockpit of his GB Sportster<\/em><\/strong>, plus a newspaper clipping of Wiley Post standing in front of the Winnie Mae<\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n (In July 1933, the American aviator and one-eyed adventurer Wiley Post made the first solo flight around the world, flying a Lockheed Yega monoplane named the Winnie Mae<\/em><\/strong>. He flew 15,596 miles in 7 days, 18 hours, 49 minutes, a new record for that distance.)<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n On many a rainy Saturday afternoon, Chuck Brown and I sat scrunched down in our seats at the Rex Theater for hours on end, watching the good guys come thundering over the ridge, again and again.<\/p>\n The Rex was a rundown movie house that featured Western movies exclusively. It was located on Portland’s west side, a block or two up from the waterfront. And it cost a dime to get in.<\/p>\n Sometimes that was a problem for us.<\/p>\n Still, we got along.<\/p>\n To start with, we’d usually hitch a free ride into town on the back ledge of one of the big streetcars that cut a swath down through the sprawling east side of Portland to the Morrison Street Bridge and on across the Willamette River into the heart of downtown. The first time we tried this trick, the conductor spotted us and kicked us off at the next stop.<\/p>\n As the depression deepened, however, the transit system did away with conductors. They ran the big green and yellow streetcars with only the one motorman up front. So we’d crouch low on the back end and ride the rails all the way to the bridge.<\/p>\n Dangerous? Yes, it probably was. But we didn’t tell our mothers about it.<\/p>\n At the Rex Theater, on those occasions when we only had a dime between the two of us, we’d try to sneak in. As you sat in the theater, the small men’s room was down the aisle and through some velvet curtains to the left of the screen. Early on, we’d spotted the small “exit” sign above the curtained doorway. Sure enough, at the end of that hallway was a door that opened onto a back alley.<\/p>\n If Chuck had a dime and I was broke, he’d pay to get in. After sitting in the dark a few minutes, he’d make his way down the aisle and through\u00a0the curtains on past the men’s room, open the exit door a crack, stick a clothes pin he carried into the door jam, and then return to his seat.<\/p>\n In the alley, I’d wait maybe three or four minutes before making my move, so nobody would notice one kid going through the curtains and two coming out. When I felt the time was right, I’d slip inside the theater, close the door behind me, take a pee in the tiny men’s room, wash my hands, and nonchalantly walk out through the curtains and up the aisle to our rendezvous point.<\/p>\n Sometimes this gambit worked\u2014sometimes it didn’t.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n A few blocks south of the Rex was located Portland’s wondrous burlesque house\u2014the Rialto Theater. Chuck Brown and I were curious about the place, but at that time we were too young to be able to imagine what went on inside. We checked the Rialto’s back alley exit doors several times to see if we could sneak our way in, but it didn’t work.<\/p>\n A year or two later, we did finagle our way into the Rialto and as I look back now on that playful burlesque, it all seems so innocent. To my young eyes at the time, those slapstick comics were hilarious, the dancing dollies were gorgeous, and the blowzy blonde second from the left sent an illicit chill through me.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n Reading the “funny papers” on Sunday morning was always a happy highlight of the week around our house. My favorites were Krazy Kat, Tarzan, Buck Rogers, and Dick Tracy. The Dick Tracy strip introduced hard-hitting realism into the funnies for the first time. Then in 1934 came a flurry of new strips. I added Terry & the Pirates, Lil’ Abner and Flash Gordon to my list of favorites.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n <\/p>\n On rainy winter nights when I was about 12 years old, if I wasn’t doing my homework or reading a book or staring at the ceiling or drawing cartoons or listening to the radio or playing cards with my grandmother or playing checkers with my grandfather, I sometimes could be found working on model airplanes. There was no such thing as a plastic model airplane kit. Making model airplanes was a labor of love that demanded a blueprint, diagrams, balsawood, carving knife, tissue paper, glue, sandpaper, paint, decals,\u00a0thread, determination, sure hands and plenty of patience. I still remember fondly the exotic banana-smell of model airplane glue. My grandfather helped me to get started. I think I made five maybe six models total. Using fine thread, I hung the finished products from the ceiling of my room<\/p>\n I had two favorites:<\/p>\n One was the SPAD, of course\u2014that tough little WWI fighter plane. It was always a machine set to stir the blood. Yet it always retained a sense of Gallic elegance and style. I decorated my model with Eddie Rickenbacker’s famed “Hat in the Ring” insignia.<\/p>\n My other favorite was the GB\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>Sportster<\/em><\/strong>, that squat, stubby all-powerful, all-out air racer developed by the Granville brothers, Zantford and Tom. It had a brief, bloody but spectacular history. It took four firsts in the National Air Races. And in September, 1932, it established the world speed record when Jimmy Doolittle flew the GB over a three-mile course at 296.28 mph.<\/span><\/p>\n (This was the same Jimmy Doolittle who became a celebrated hero ten years later during WWII. April 18, 1942, during the early stages of the war when things were not going well for us in the Pacific and when American morale badly needed a boost, Lt. Colonel James H. Doolittle led a daring, seemingly impossible, one-way, low-level B-25 air raid over Tokyo that shocked the implacable Japanese.)<\/p>\n The GB Sportster<\/em><\/strong> looked like an angry, pugnacious bumble bee, with its fat, stubby 15-foot fuselage painted yellow and black. And that’s exactly the way I painted my model.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n On opening day of the baseball season in ’34 or ’35, my dad introduced me to his latest girlfriend, a bubbly, effervescent 20-year-old brunette named Eleanor Brook. I liked her immediately. Her friendly face was pink and round as a pie. And when my dad introduced us, she enveloped me in a bear hug that darn near took my breath away.<\/p>\n The Portland Beavers were playing the San Francisco Seals\u2014two arch rivals in the old Pacific Coast League. The rains had stopped. It was a bright, sunny spring day. And the three of us went out to the ball game.<\/p>\n I played a little softball as a kid, but I never did play any\u00a0baseball. I admit I was never more than mildly interested in what was then “the national pastime.” But hey, it was opening day of the new season, with roasted peanuts and root beer and hot dogs slathered with mustard and close-up action on the field and a loud hopeful crowd in the stands. It had all the makings of a great afternoon.<\/p>\n As I recall it, the Portland Beavers lost the game.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n I could tell that my dad and Eleanor were falling in love. It was obvious, even to my immature grade-school mind. The two were inseparable.<\/p>\n On her 21st birthday, my dad gave her a ring, and a few weeks later they were married. He was 41 years old at the time. A 20-year-difference in ages! To the surprise of many people, including my mother, their marriage was a strong and happy relationship that lasted 32 years, until the day my dad died of cancer in 1966.<\/p>\n At the time of their wedding, Eleanor was pastry maker in an east side gourmet bakery. The bakery often featured her\u00a0silky-smooth custard pies. However, when she learned that I was wild about banana cream pie, she launched a tradition that I was to appreciate for years to come: Whenever I joined them for dinner in their small house out on Southeast 72nd Street, she would bake us a luscious banana cream pie for dessert.<\/span><\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n I’m not certain why, but during the ’30s, everybody seemed to love the comical antics of black-faced Amos and Andy. It was the most popular nightly show on the NBC radio network. I thought it was stupid. So I didn’t share in my grandmother’s nightly ritual of listening to Amos and Andy, followed by the trials and tribulations of Myrt and Marge. But I did share her healthy enthusiasm for The Shadow, an over-the-top atmospheric thriller.<\/p>\n “Who knows what evil lurks in the minds of men?”<\/p>\n “The Shadow knows.”<\/p>\n Sunday nights on the NBC radio network it was a different story. We all sat glued to the radio on Sunday nights, laughing and listening to the Eddie Cantor Hour followed by the Jack Benny Show. Jack Benny was probably my all-time favorite radio comedian. He was a master at self-deprecating humor. Years later, his wit and style led the way on television,\u00a0too.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n Following the death of Uncle George Littreal from lung cancer, my Aunt Phoebe gave up life in the logging camps and returned to the city with an exciting idea.<\/p>\n Sitting around our dining room table one night, she shared her thoughts with my mother. The two of them talked earnestly far into the late hours. The following morning, they announced their new partnership.<\/p>\n Phoebe and my mother had decided to open a restaurant!<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n After scouring the town for a good, low-rent location, they settled on storefront space in a drab, two-story brick building over on the west side, across the street from the Portland Civic Auditorium. A grubby little coffee shop that had once occupied the space was long gone, although fixtures’ and equipment were still in place. The building owner was growing desperate. My mother and Phoebe said he made them an offer they couldn’t refuse. The deal included painting the interior, installation of a new Frigidaire<\/em><\/strong>, and a low-rent lease<\/p>\n They named their restaurant the “Good Eats Cafe”\u2014 neatly scripted in a small circular neon sign which they hung in the front window.<\/p>\n As you entered the “Good Eats Cafe,” a counter with maybe eight or nine stools took up the entire left side of the room. Four, maybe five booths lined the wall along the right side. At the rear end was a small kitchen, storage space and a single toilet. That was it.<\/p>\n My mother handled the front end, both counter and booths at the start. Phoebe handled the kitchen. My grandfather, with an aching back and a gimpy leg, quit his WPA job and came in as part-time dishwasher and potato peeler. He alternated with a Chinese cleanup man. And when I was around, I poured water, cleared dishes or just hung out.. They kept the place open for lunch and early dinner.<\/p>\n Phoebe and my mother made a good, hard-working team. They enjoyed each other’s company. In the mornings, they’d work together on one big daily special. This was usually some old family favorite, such as meatloaf with mashed potatoes, or corned beef and cabbage, or chicken and dumplings, or pot roast with onion gravy. Then Phoebe would go to work, baking those magnificent fruit pies that had made her the toast of the Oregon logging camps. Apple pie was on the menu every day, along with\u00a0a couple of changing fruit varieties. Once she put raisin pie on the menu. But my grandfather and I seemed to be the only ones around who appreciated it.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n Today’s world of professional boxing is such a stinking cesspool that it’s difficult for me now to recapture the frame of mind I had as a 12-year-old, when I was an avid fight fan. My dad and my grandfather certainly never demonstrated any great personal interest in the ring. Admittedly, my grandmother did. She listened regularly to the Friday night fights on radio. And she had strong opinions on everything that happened at the heavyweight championship level.<\/p>\n Ask her and she could tell you in an instant that in 1930, Max Schmeling of Germany won a hotly-disputed decision over the tough Irish-American, Jack Sharkey, to become the new heavyweight champion of the world. Two years later, in 1932, Sharkey beat Schmeling and regained the title. In 1933, massive Primo Carnero knocked out Sharkey in the sixth, taking the heavyweight crown to Italy. Less than a year later, the Italian giant lost the championship to America’s Max Baer.<\/p>\n Baer was a natural. He could have been one of the all- time great ones, according to sports writers in the know. But he was never a hungry fighter, he was a playboy.<\/p>\n In June 1935, the month that I graduated from Buckman Grammar School, I can remember huddling with my grandmother in front of the radio as we listened, round by round, to a broadcast of the championship bout in which Max Baer lost the title on points to that popular Irish-American family man, James J. Braddock.<\/p>\n No knockout.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n The restaurant location turned out to be a good one. Across the street, the civic auditorium drew crowds for all kinds of events, both high and low. During the concert season, for example, the auditorium\u00a0featured such guest artists as Lily Pons, Paul Robeson, John McCormack and Vladimir Horowitz with the Portland Symphony Orchestra. During the rest of the year, the auditorium featured Friday or Saturday night boxing matches and other special events.<\/p>\n All of this action resulted in good business for the “Good Eats Cafe.” After only a few weeks, a parade of musicians, stage hands, boxers and handlers were joining in with, local workmen who\u00a0piled into the restaurant daily for great home-style cooking. In the afternoon, too, many of them started popping in for an extra cup of coffee and another piece of pie.<\/p>\n During summer vacation that year, when I was able to spend more time at the restaurant, I started collecting autographs of the top boxers who came in to eat. I got myself a cheap autograph book, which I kept under the counter. Id approach my targets when they were in a good mood, usually right after they finished eating a big slab of Aunt Phoebe’s pie.<\/p>\n Most of them were ham and egg fighters. No big names\u2014until the day when Max Baer, himself, walked through the door, along with his towering brother, Buddy, and a couple of handlers. Everybody instantly recognized the recent ex-champ. He was in town to help manage the corner of his younger- brother, who had top billing in the upcoming Saturday night fights.<\/p>\n When several of the locals called out, “Hi, champ,” Max Baer worked the room like a Hollywood, star. He turned and waved, shook hands up and down the counter, slid into his brother’s booth, and then signed a few autographs, including a flourish for me that filled one entire page in my book.<\/p>\n Buddy Baer lost that Saturday night fight. But I got his autograph before he ever got into the ring. Some years later, he went on to carve out a minor career for himself in Hollywood “B” movies.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n As far as I know, none of the concert stars who appeared at the civic auditorium ever made it across the street to the “Good Eats Cafe,” with one notable exception. That was the violinist, Yehudi Menuhin, one of this century’s greatest musicians. He visited our little restaurant one day in the company of his manager. At the time, Menuhin was about 19 years old.<\/p>\n Menuhin agreeably signed a special page in my “boxers” autograph book. And his manager invited me across the street to sit through an afternoon rehearsal.<\/p>\n I don’t remember the program. Part of it might have been a Hungarian Rhapsody. I remember that it was an enthralling eye-opener for me. Hauntingly beautiful music. An incredible violinist. An absorbing afternoon.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The great Irish-American tenor, John McCormack, was nearing the end\u00a0of his lengthy career when he\u00a0appeared on the concert platform at the Portland Civic Auditorium in the mid ’30s. He was a much beloved international figure of the ’20s. Loyal crowds came to hear his lyrical rendition of Irish folk songs. In honor of McCormack s visit to Portland that week, my mother and Phoebe went all the way. They featured “McCormack corned beef and cabbage” with boiled potatoes, all week long.<\/p>\n McCormack never made it across the street to see how he’d been honored at the “Good Eats Cafe.” But a few of the stage hands did. One evening, when it was almost closing time, three workmen sitting in a back booth finished their heaping plates of corned beef and cabbage. Then, unexpectedly, in “a tribute to the chef,” they burst out with a rousing rendition of “When Irish Eyes are Smiling.” The surprised customers seemed to love it.<\/p>\n That’s when my grandfather prodded and cajoled me into joining the fun. “Come on, Byron,” he growled, “stand up there and give ’em an Irish song of your own.” The workmen picked up on that and urged me on.<\/p>\n I was terribly embarrassed, of course. While I had often hammed it up with the family at home, the idea of singing in public scared the daylights out of me. Finally, after further arm-twisting, I did it. I made my painful debut there in the middle of the “Good Eats Cafe.”<\/p>\n Silence descended on the room, as I stood there for a moment or two with a poignant look on my face, clutching my checkered cap in both hands. Then, I gulped a couple of times, opened wide, and belted out a heart-grabbing chorus of dear old “Mother Machree” in my high 12-year- old tenor voice.<\/p>\n A dozen or so people still left in the place applauded wildly. My grandfather said afterwards, “There wasn’t a dry eye left in the house.” I don’t know about that.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n Even now, when on a darkened street, seeing a faint neon CAFE sign, I am reminded of those days and my mother and Aunt Phoebe and their little west side restaurant called the “Good Eats Cafe”.<\/p>\n
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